I define attention leak as:

Having heightened productivity and purpose, yet straying away from the task at hand with blinding belief of taking another task as equally or more important – there by leaking attention.

This results in wasted hard work and productivity, as one hops from one important task to another – never really shipping anything but having opened a lot of avenues.

Some may think that this is similar to having a small attention ‘span’. I don’t think it is the same concept because people who have low attention span simply cannot put their focus on a plan. People with a big attention leak have the capacity to do deep work, and sometimes can get themselves in the zone and get stuff done. Their attention span is stellar. But they simply keep grinding their processors trying to jump onto the next important thing. For example, Hamza sits down and plans his week. He spends a good amount of time going thru everything and picking the important stuff. He has everything figured out, neat and tidy. Yet as the week progresses, he is mid way thru a very hard book… he finds a pointer to another book. At this point, he follows that rabbit hole and so on until his attention has deviated from the original week’s plan. Mind you, Hamza still gets a whole lot more done than his peers and he ends up in a better position in the long run, yet the satisfaction of ‘winning’ and ‘shipping’ comes seldom and that makes him fall into imposter syndrome.